Abstract

Swerdlow was famous for his view that modern scholars should be able to understand the mathematics used by ancient writers. His translations of and commentary on the 16th-century astronomer Copernicus and other astronomers are foundational texts still read around the world.

Highlights

  • He joined the history department at the University of Chicago as an assistant professor in 1968, and moved to the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1982, where he remained until his retirement in 2010

  • Swerdlow wanted not just to translate these ancient scholars’ work, but to bring it into context with the mathematics, instruments, observations and data they would have been using; this fed into a larger movement in the history of science in the past halfcentury to recreate the tools with which past scientists studied the natural world

  • “He could take some classical astronomer — who might be a Babylonian who wrote on clay tablets, not just Galileo or Kepler — and dig into the mathematics they were using in order to understand it at the deepest possible level: how they did it and how they were thinking about the measurements,” said Prof

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Summary

Introduction

He joined the history department at the University of Chicago as an assistant professor in 1968, and moved to the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1982, where he remained until his retirement in 2010. Swerdlow’s research focused on the history of the mathematical and astronomical sciences from antiquity through the 17th century, becoming the world’s leading authority on the technical aspects of Copernicanism and astronomical mathematics in the Renaissance.

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